By Donna Beth Weilenman
Staff Reporter

Solano County has endorsed the concept of declaring the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and possibly some land beyond, as the first National Heritage Area to be established on the West Coast.

The Board of Supervisors unanimously agreed last week to support the concept of establishing the Delta as a National Heritage Area, a designation that would be given by the U.S. Congress.

“I’m really pleased we were successful,” District 2 Supervisor Linda Seifert said Tuesday about the vote to add the Benicia and Vallejo Carquinez Strait coastline to the proposed Heritage Area.

“It’s incredibly important that the board recognizes that the Benicia-Vallejo waterfront is the gateway to the Delta and should be included,” Seifert said.

In contrast to some supporters of the legislative draft introduced by U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Seifert said it is too early to suggest modifications to the proposal’s points.

Both Benicia and Vallejo have agreed to support Feinstein’s legislation. At its Aug. 17 meeting, Benicia City Council endorsed the legislation and asked the Board of Supervisors to include Benicia and Vallejo portion of the Carquinez Strait in that heritage area.

“The City Council supports the Delta Protection Commission’s desire to enhance the Delta as a place and promote the Delta economy,” Interim City Manager Jim Erickson wrote in a letter Aug. 19 to Board Chairman John M. Vazquez.

The Delta includes portions of east Solano County, particularly its rural areas. Other sites that have been suggested for inclusion into the Heritage Area are Suisun Marsh as well as Benicia and Vallejo, both on the Carquinez Strait.

Although the National Park Service assists with the program, a National Heritage Area isn’t a national park. It doesn’t become owned by the federal government, nor are there additional land use controls imposed on the properties within.

“You could think of it as branding the region for visitors,” said Dr. William Eisenstein, of Eisenstein Consulting, based in Berkeley, consultant to the state’s Delta Vision and director of the Delta Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley.

The legislation’s concept also has the support of the Delta Counties coalition, made up of Contra Costa, Sacramento, San Joaquin, Solano and Yolo counties, which Piepho wrote had been working for several years on water and other Delta issues.

The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is one of the largest estuaries in the United states, second only to the Chesapeake Bay. The Delta also is significant for its environment, farming history and the water-based recreation dating years when steamboats traveled from Sacramento to San Francisco, said Alex Westhoff, of Einstein Consulting, a Berkeley-based firm, who has undertaken the study of whether the heritage area designation is feasible for the area. His study will take several more months to complete.

Feinstein’s bill has the support of neighboring Contra Costa County, too, although its Board of Supervisors recommended a few changes to the drafted legislation, such as increased federal participation and the ability for non-federal governments to use in-kind services and other methods to contribute their share of the program’s costs.

Contra Costa Supervisor Mary N. Piepho wrote the panel June 30 that the bill would appropriate $2 million the first year to carry out the heritage area’s management plan. In addition, it would provide “such sums as are necessary in each of the following nine years for the Heritage Area strategic plan,” for a combined total of $20 million, with up to 50 percent of the costs to be borne by the federal government.

Local governments could use those funds as leverage to obtain grants from other sources, supporters of the national program have said.

“The NHA designation would be a first step in providing federal resources to agencies in the Delta for economic development and environmental protection,” Piepho wrote.

As a Heritage Area, as defined in Congress, the Delta would be recognized federally as “a place designated by Congress where naural, cultural, historic and recreation resources combine to form a cohesive, nationally-distinctive landscape arising from patterns of human activity shaped by geography,” she wrote.

Such a designation first was proposed for the Delta in 2008 by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Delta Vision Blue Ribbon Task Force, which was formed to develop a plan for managing the Delta as a sustainable ecosystem to support environmental and economic activities critical to the state.

The task force saw the designation as a way to provide federal assistance to the Delta. The next year, the Delta Protection Commission began studying whether a Delta Heritage Area could be established.

Feinstein’s legislation would make the Delta the first Heritage Area on the West Coast.

Most of the current 49 are in the east, although a few are west of the Continental Divide.

Among sites Congress has chosen during the Heritage Area program’s 25-year existence are Abraham Lincoln National Heritage area in Springfield, Ill.; the Baltimore National Heritage Area in Maryland; the Blue Ridge National Heritage Area in Asheville, N.C.; the Crossroads of the American Revolution National Heritage Area in Princeton, N.J.; and farther west, the Cache La Poudre River Corridor in Fort Collins, Colo.; the Yuma Crossing National Heritage Area in Yuma, Ariz.; and the Great Basin National Heritage Area in Baker, Nev.